As Vivo introduces its X80 series in India, the focus—like many other flagships— remains on the camera capabilities. But there’s a lot going on behind the scenes with the cameras on these phones. While the X80 series continues its partnership with renowned lens and camera brand Zeiss, the brand is also focussing on Artificial Intelligence and its own dedicated V1+ imaging chipset.
“Smartphone photography is half computation and half hardware. With our V1+ imaging chip and with traditional processors getting better and faster every year, there is a lot more neural processing, AI work that is now going into imaging and it will keep getting better,” says Keshav Chugh, product manager for image effects at vivo.
For vivo X80, the company is using Sony’s IMX866 for the primary 50MP camera, while the high-end Pro gets the Samsung GNV sensor for the 50MP camera. Vivo says both have been customised for their phones, and according to Chugh, the sensor size also makes a difference.
“The bigger the sensor, the more light that’s going into the camera and the more details we have to work with to compute. We are using glass lenses supplied by Zeiss. So that’s the physics part sorted. And the second factor—computation—is the future and this is why we developed the V1+ chip,” he says.
The V1+ can do all the heavy lifting when it comes to running the resource-intensive algorithms required for imaging processes such as a super night mode (for low-light photography) or an AI super-resolution mode or even for the AI skin feature.
The vivo executive says the company has spent millions of dollars trying to figure out how to implement artificial retouching. “We paid professional retouchers to retouch portrait pictures for us. They spend four to five hours on each picture. And then our team in Hangzhou developed a neural network machine learning algorithm to learn from the before and after images”, Chugh explained.
The vivo X80 series goes on sale in India starting today at Rs 54,999 for the base X80, while the Pro version costs Rs 79,999.
Picture Perfect
*For vivo X80, the company is using Sony’s IMX866 for the primary 50MP camera
*The high-end Pro gets the Samsung GNV sensor for the 50MP camera
*The vivo X80 series goes on sale in India starting today at Rs 54,999 for the base model
